Atlas of Furniture Design

FROM THE BOOK

During the German occupation of the Netherlands the architect and furniture designer Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was not allowed to practice his profession because he refused to become a member of the Nederlandsche Kultuurkamer (the Netherlands Chamber of Culture), which was established in 1941 and supported National Socialist ideology. In anticipation of better times to come Rietveld revisited an old idea, 'a chair that emerges from the machine in one fell swoop'.

After having constructed the Birza Chair from a single sheet of fibreboard in 1927, Rietveld had continued to search for better combinations of materials and forms. He produced innumerable sketches for chairs made from materials as different as metal and cane, and made small models from acrylic glass and cardboard. His design drawings indicate that he had intended to produce a chair from fibreboard. However, possibly influenced by his youngest son Wim, who was a metalworker and precision mechanic, he and Wim produced a full-size model in Aluminium in 1942. The tub-like seat, the separate back legs and the braces between the seat and the sides were beaten, bent, and riveted together by hand. The folded-over edges and the round holes serve to reinforce the structural strength of the material. The holes are reminiscent of the Landi Chair, which was designed by Hans Coray in 1938. Rietveld was doubtlessly familiar with this design, as an example was owned by Truus Schröder (who commissioned the Rietveld Schröder House and was his partner). Moreover, 'shortly before or early on in the war' Max Bill had used these chairs to furnish a stand at the Jaarbeurs exhibition centre in Utrecht.

After the war, Rietveld’s Aluminium Chair was depicted in the avant-garde magazine 'Open Oog,' and displayed at the Salon des artistes décorateurs in Paris in 1949 and elsewhere. Nevertheless, Rietveld was unable to find a manufacturer for the design; the form was probably too extreme. A critic wrote that while Rietveld seemed to be obsessed by the need to quickly manufacture large quantities of furniture for the hundreds of thousands of people who had lost everything in the war, he himself had misgivings: 'The aluminium model [Rietveld] has made still bears all the marks of an experiment; only an eccentric will place this lounge chair in his sitting room.' But there was appreciation, too. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam acquired the prototype in 1950 and a decade later the Technische Hogeschool Delft, forerunner of Delft University of Technology, was keen to add the chair to its collection. Rietveld and his sons Wim and Egbert therefore produced three more examples at Egbert’s technical instrument factory in Epe in 1960. The design was never put into serial production, probably because the aluminium began to tear at the corners and further development of the design would therefore have been necessary. The Aluminium Chair is in effect a failed variant of an old concept, but the design speaks to the imagination more than ever, probably because the form dovetails well with the sculptural furniture realized using industrial materials in recent decades, including designs by Marc Newson and Ron Arad. - Ida van Zijl